Mike Murphy, founder and managing partner of Sunstone Management Advisors, has worn the CEO, COO and CRO hats across three decades in healthcare and insurance. In this episode he recounts how he launched a cold‑start insurance division that rocketed to $435 million in revenue and $22 million in EBITDA in just four years, and now clears the $1 billion mark. He even delivered 18% revenue growth and a 40% EBITDA jump within his first year steering three merged healthcare entities.

At the heart of his success was the “greenhouse” experiment: an in‑house test market where agents sold competitor products so Murphy’s own offering had to prove itself at every turn. He explains why running as if you’re cash‑starved from day one forces ruthless discipline and how that early mindset continues to separate winners from wishful thinkers.

You’ll also hear the deceptively simple A + B = C check that Mike uses to expose false premises—if great people plus a good product still don’t hit targets, something fundamental is broken. When his leadership team argued over how much change was needed to reach a $1 billion valuation, he improvised a 1–10 “change scale” to pin down hidden disagreements and avoid collective denial.

Healthcare operators and real‑estate investors alike will gain clear, battle‑tested advice on commanding your P&L before negotiations, building feedback loops that surface inconvenient truths fast, and resisting the temptation to chalk up disasters or windfalls to one‑offs. Tune in for every unvarnished lesson on execution, data‑driven decisions, and the high‑stakes experiments that turn uncertainty into predictable wins.

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